First and foremost, dogs who have been abused have good reason to be afraid of humans.  Such dogs may be reluctant to approach humans, accept affection, or work, and may even have a tendency to snap or snarl at people.  This needs to be seen as the result of real and justifiable fear, and definitely not as disobedience or naughtiness.  The protocol for resolving this is desensitisation, not discipline. 

Secondly, abused dogs, when finally placed in a rescue home where they are treated with love and kindness, often bond exceptionally closely with their new family.  But this usually does not generalise to other people, and in particular, it may not generalise to someone giving a training class or to other people in the class.

In other words, your rescue dog may become extremely attached to you in a very short space of time, but he may nevertheless be very frightened of the trainer, the behaviourist, people in class who try to pet him, or the vet, for example.  There is no information in his mind to help him distinguish between people who will hurt him and people who won't.

And thirdly, if he has been hit or kicked, he may be able to tolerate people moving around him going about their normal business, but find the approach of a hand or foot very threatening, and become anxious.

So the first rule of conduct around dogs like this is: take his fears seriously.  If you had gone through what he has, you'd also be scared of people.

How does this apply to clicker training, though?  Clicker training is kind, non-invasive and reward-based, so should be perfect for an abused dog.  Why isn't my dog responding to the clicker?

To come up with one surprisingly common (and frequently overlooked) answer to this question, let's take a big step back and recall a bit of the theory.  (You'll find more information about the theory in the Training Theory section of this site.)

To most dog trainers, clicker training is primarily associated with operant conditioning, in which the dog learns that a particular behaviour, like 'sit', will be reinforced, or rewarded, so develops a tendency to sit more often.  There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but the most widely understood aspect of clicker training is that we can use reinforcement as a technique for getting, perfecting and maintaining the behaviour we want.

But clicker training is also heavily dependent on classical conditioning, or associative learning, in which the dog learns that a particular stimulus will result in a particular outcome for the dog; after a few repetitions of the association, the dog will start responding with an anticipatory reflexive reaction to the stimulus as if it were the outcome.

It is this phenomenon which allows us to use a clicker and pair it with a food treat in the first place.  We start every dog off by clicking and treating several times, until the dog shows signs of anticipating the treat.  A lot of trainers refer to this as 'charging' the clicker, and it's a good analogy.  The sound of the clicker begins to predict the arrival of a food treat, and if the arrival of the food treat is pleasurable to the dog, the clicker becomes conditioned as a conditioned positive reinforcer, and starts triggering a pleasure response in the dog in its own right, which is why the technique is so powerful.

But that if is a very important if indeed!

Let's go back to the rescue dog.  We'll look at the case of Orphan Annie, who has some global fear of humans and is particularly nervous about hands.  Annie, whose previous owner Jemma was a real pearl because of her chronic alcoholism, has also been tormented around food.  Jemma used to starve her for a couple of days so she was really hungry, then offer her a tasty tidbit and smack her or pinch her very painfully if she tried to take it, so Annie has a classic approach/avoidance conflict around food offered from someone's hand.  She wants the tidbit, but is afraid of what the hand might do. 

Annie also got fed on takeaway leftovers more often than not.  Jemma was particularly fond of Thai and Indian cooking, so Annie got used to sweet and spicy foods, but often had an upset stomach because of the spices, and got her mouth burned by a really hot chilli in a chicken curry once or twice.

• she found the general environment in the class stressful, which suppressed her appetite and made it difficult for her to learn (how much food fantasising do you do when you're nervous about a big exam or being hauled over the coals by the boss?)
• her stomach was fairly full from an earlier meal, so she was partially sated and not particularly interested in food at that moment
• some of the treats Nigel had brought along were unfamiliar and not particularly palatable to her
• one of them, the chicken, was strongly associated with an unpleasant experience of eating a painfully hot chili
• most distressingly, the presentation of food in the hand was strongly associated with previous ill-treatment and triggered her old approach/avoidance conflict with its emotions of severe anxiety, which she resolved by displacing (turning her head away and pretending that it wasn't happening).

• it produces a sound which is dissimilar to most other sounds in the dog’s environment  
• it produces the same sound every time
• it produces a sound which is clearly audible to the dog at quite a distance
• it is quick and easy to operate, and thus very accurate (a reflex click will come out a lot faster than ‘good boy’ will)

Furthermore, there is some evidence from research into neurophysiology that the sound of the clicker (a sharp, mechanical click-click) is precisely the type of stimulus which bypasses the cortex (the thinking part of the brain) and goes directly to the limbic system (the emotional part of the brain), so it becomes a much more powerful conditioned reinforcer than a spoken word does.

So with almost all dogs, conditioning the clicker works so well and so fast that it rarely occurs to anybody to wonder if the conditioning has failed.

And furthermore, trainers are exactly that: trainers.  They are usually people with very good timing and observation skills and a good general grasp of operant conditioning theory, and are very capable  at teaching the practical skills of clicker training, but they are not necessarily skilled at diagnosing psychological problems in dogs, and are probably not familiar with the minutiae of behavioural theory.  Nor do they need to be.  It's not their job, although there is a lot of overlap between the roles of trainer and behaviourist.

The net result is that practically-oriented clicker trainers tend to develop a profound and superstitious faith in the power of the clicker, which is, after all, just a little plastic and metal gadget!  Somehow, just hearing the click is supposed to magically turn any dog into a model of trainability, and the notion that the sound of the click might be meaningless, or even worse, actually unpleasant to the dog, is virutally seen as heresy!

I have actually overheard a trainer tell an owner who had a dog much like Annie to insist that the dog produce the desired behaviours, even if it meant forcing them, and to keep on clicking and tossing treats at the dog, whether it wanted them or not.  She apparently saw a lack of responsiveness to the click as some sort of wilful disobedience on the dog's part!  Dogs ought to like clicker training, and if they don't they're just being bad!

I can only repeat, and keep on repeating: there is nothing magic about the clicker.  There is nothing magic about the sound it makes.  It's just a little plastic and metal gadget.  What gives it its power is its meaning to the dog, and nothing else.  To give the clicker meaning to the dog, it must be paired with something else, and only the dog gets to decide whether the something else is pleasurable or horrible.  As a very wise dog handler once said, we have all the opinions, but the dog has all the facts.

Back to Annie

After half a dozen increasingly frustrating lessons, the trainer told Nigel that she thought Annie was abnormal in some way, as she had never seen a response like this before.  She said she thought it would be better if he stopped coming to classes, and took Annie to the vet.

The vet couldn't find anything physically wrong with Annie, except that she was getting a little fat, so he recommended a clinical behaviourist called Sue.

Sue went to visit Nigel and Annie, listened to the whole saga, took out a clicker, and while watching Annie carefully, clicked once.  Annie flinched.

So the next step was, unfortunately, a funeral.

Sue put the clicker in a little box. She tied a ribbon around it, wrapped it in plastic, and buried the whole caboodle in Nigel's pot plant.  Then she gave him strict instructions not to unearth it until it was clear that Annie was ready for another try.

The next step was to find out whether Annie would work for food treats, and if so, for what kind of treat.  Nigel was instructed to go shopping and come home with the widest variety of potential dog treats he could find.  He bought roast chicken, more boerewors, bits of cheese, pieces of fruit, every dog biscuit treat on the shelf, several brands of vienna sausage, cat kibble, bird seed, peanut butter sweets, you name it.

Then he and Sue set Annie up.  One morning they deprived her of breakfast and kept her out of the kitchen.  Nigel then scattered tiny bits of various treats on the kitchen floor.  He and Sue let Annie into the kitchen and watched her through the serving hatch.

Annie went straight for the cheese and gobbled it, ignored the chicken, sniffed the cat kibble and ate some, ate one brand of dog biscuit and left another one, and really took to pieces of dried mango!  Without anyone in the kitchen waving their arms around and fussing, Annie was free to concentrate on deciding what it was she wanted to sample, and her body language demonstrated that she was free of any anxiety.

Sue and Nigel made notes, divided the treats into high value, medium value and boooooring!!!, and then made up two mixes, one of high value treats and one of the less interesting but stll enjoyable stuff. 

The next step was to install a different conditioned reinforcer in such a way as not to distress Annie. Sue gave Nigel strict instructions, and then went home so that Annie would not be perturbed by her presence.  Nigel prepared about 40 treats from a mixture of the high and medium value lists.  He waited until just before Annie's supper time, so she hadn't had anything to eat for several hours and was fairly hungry.  Then he took her into the kitchen, which was quite large and had a linileum floor.

He said "Bingo" in a neutral tone of voice and then tossed a treat onto the floor, more or less in Annie's direction.  He was careful not to raise his voice, make a fuss of her or wave his arms around, and Annie was able to pick the treat up off the floor instead of having to take it from a hand.  She picked up and ate the treats with great enthusiasm.

After she had had 20 or so treats, Nigel said "Bingo" and didn't throw the next one.  Annie looked up expectantly, waiting for her treat.  The word "bingo" had been successfully conditioned as a conditioned reinforcer, and was now becoming something Annie would work for.  

Nigel continued saying "Bingo" and tossing treats until they were all used up.  Later that evening, while reading a book, he noticed Annie meander across the living room and sit on the mat near the TV.  He immediately said "Bingo" and tossed her a high-value treat (which he had craftily hidden under a book on the coffee table.)  Annie looked startled and pleased, and then thoughtful, and then she sat again, Nigel said "Bingo" again and tossed her another treat, and they were off.

And this, of course, is how the clicker should have been conditioned in the first place - with great care and thought to ensure that the desired associations were being made, and the wrong ones avoided.

As it happened, Annie enjoyed working so much that it was soon possible to counter-condition the clicker as as a pleasurable stimulus, which made things much easier for Nigel.  And in many cases where the dog is not too badly traumatised, repeated and prolonged exposure to training situations in which nothing too awful happens will result in the dog becoming less fearful (the technical term for this is flooding). 

But why slow the process down and put the dog through any unnecessary distress?  With a little more thought on the part of the trainer, Annie could have been working happily for the clicker from day one.